搭在衣架上 Clothes On The Rack
那些女子見水又清又熱,便要洗浴,即一齊脫了衣服,搭在衣架上,一齊下去。被行者看見:那些女子见水又清又热,便要洗浴,即一齐脱了衣服,搭在衣架上,一齐下去。被行者看见:
逐句解 Line by line
The women, seeing the water so clear and so warm, wanted at once to bathe. They stripped off their clothes together, hung them on the rack, and went down into it all together.
一齊 twice in one sentence — together, in one movement. The clothes go onto the rack Pilgrim is already sitting on, and the book does not point this out.
And Pilgrim saw:
被 makes it passive — it was seen by Pilgrim. Five characters, and the grammar quietly puts him in the position of somebody who could not help it.
Buttons slipped loose, silk sashes untied.
褪 is tuì, to slip a thing off. 解 is jiě, to untie. The couplet opens the way the kickball poem did — with the hands, doing something small.
Soft breasts white as silver; jade bodies all over like snow.
渾 means wholly, all through. Both halves compare skin to a mineral — silver, then snow — which is the standard vocabulary and keeps the description at a distance from any actual body.
The clothes come off and go onto the rack, and Pilgrim is sitting on the rack. He planned that two passages ago and the book lets you work it out.
The grammar of the second line is worth a moment. It does not say Pilgrim looked; it says the sight was seen by him — a passive construction that puts him in the position of somebody who happened to be there. He is a fly on a clothes rack he chose deliberately, and the sentence is being tactful on his behalf.